Monthly Archives: February 2008

It’s been pointed out a couple of times that the Foundation hasn’t been super public in its activities. In some cases it just can’t be, say if it’s secretly negotiating a data donation or something but for the most part we can waffle on about our achievements. So what have we been doing? We have monthly phone board meetings which last 2-3 hours to go over everything. A lot of it is fairly mundane like responding to communications but others take somewhat more work, things like:

The conference. Andy, 80n and Steve from OSMF are working with NickB, cjb_ie and bigbro to put all of this together. This is itself taking an hour or so conference call per week and lots of background organisation. Expect a CFP and announcements etc in the next week or two.

The license. Steve, Andy and Richard have been working on this. We’ve met and talked to various people including Jordan who wrote the ODL and pushed a process through on talk-legal

xmas party, Brighton launch party and other social events

Local chapters, GPS Unit donations and other smaller initiatives

Your friendly foundation board is available to help on these things and more.

This month, Schuyler Erle and myself will hold a series of multi-day workshops in several India cities. Researchers, students, programmers, activists and members of the community are invited to participate, learn, and take stewardship of their city. These will be very practical, hands-on days, covering the entire toolset of OpenStreetMap and empowering participants to lead the growth of free and open mapping in India. We will map India!

This kicked off by just idly chatting about bringing together Mumbai Free Map and OpenStreetMap. Schuyler had worked with CRIT over the past couple years to bring extensive geographic data of Mumbai online, and spread the word of open source geo. Why not share with OSM? Well that quickly spiraled into an idea for a continent wide month long trip. And it would have remained just an idea, if not for the amazing organizing that has taken place in just a few months. We’re now geared up to visit six cities — Pune, Mumbai, Trivandrum, Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkotta — and educate, and learn, and discuss, and MAP! If anyone reading is based in these cities, or has connections there, and are interested in participating, please do get in touch.